Amid great controversy, the South Korean National Assembly passed the Overseas Korean Act (OKA) on December 3, 1999. The benefits, which resemble quasi-citizenship rights, are justified by the South Korean government’s drive to redefine and reconstruct Korean identity in the context of an increasingly globalized world. Certain overseas Korean groups are legally included as (quasi) members of the South Korean nation-state, whereas other groups remain legal outsiders. Many people argue that the OKA defines “Korean identity” through technical and legal connections to the nation-state, South Korea, which in turn has larger implications for who does and does not constitute a Korean. Thus, the debate revolves around the confounded notions of national/legal/ethnic identities. Utilizing survey data and qualitative interviews, this article delineates the relationship between the South Korean government’s efforts to legally define Korean identity and a Korean diasporic community’s challenge based on ethnic homogeneity. Findings indicate that there is contention over not only the criteria by which one is defined as “Korean,” but also over the legitimacy of actors privileged to make such distinctions. We also point to the importance of considering historical experiences and geopolitics in shaping identity politics in the current context.

Research regarding the impact of repression on social movements has yielded conflicting findings; some argue that repression decreases the total quantity of protest events while others argue that it motivates protest. To move beyond this impasse, various scholars have suggested exploring how repression influences the quality of social movements. This study assesses the impact repression had on the formation of alliances between different social groups participating in South Korea's democracy movement. Results from negative binomial regression analyses show that repression facilitated the formation of alliances between movement actors at a time when the overall number of protest events decreased. This study contributes to the literature on coercion and mobilization by pointing to the possibility of movement development during low levels of a protest cycle.

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In comparison to the heated debate over the origins of trust in political institutions, few studies have empirically examined the linkage between trust in political and nonpolitical institutions at the individual level. In this study, we utilize a two-step methodology to investigate attitudes toward the government in the broader context of attitudes toward related nonpolitical institutions in South Korea. Results from latent class analysis reveal that political trust is an integrated part of a more general set of attitudes toward social and economic institutions. In addition, results from multinomial logistic regression analysis corroborate past studies that found a positive relationship between perceptions of institutional performance and trust in institutions while partially supporting theories advocating the importance of interpersonal trust for institutional trust. This study points to the possibility of interpersonal trust ''spilling up'' to trust in institutions and the likelihood that trust in one institution ''spills over'' to trust in other related institutions.

While most studies of the repression-mobilization relationship have focused on the impact of the former on the latter, recent work has shown that characteristics of protest can influence state repression strategies. This article corroborates recent work on the repression of social movements and shows that both weak and threatening attributes of protest events contribute to the "repressive coverage"—the likelihood of repression—of social movements in an authoritarian context. In addition, results from logistic regressions show that authoritarian states not only respond to weak-status actors and situational threats but also act strategically to repress social movements that challenge their political legitimacy. This article extends the scope of the repression-mobilization literature by differentiating factors affecting the repressive strategy of a non-Western authoritarian state.